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"Breeze, Ruth"
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Rethinking academic writing pedagogy for the European university
All over Europe, universities are moving over to English as the language of instruction. This development has been accelerated by global forces, and its pedagogical consequences have yet to be fully explored. This book examines this situation from the point of view of students and teachers, focusing particularly on the acquisition of English language writing skills in European university contexts. It takes an academic approach, and its firmly grounded in the bibliography on teaching academic writing to second language users in English-speaking countries, as well as in the bibliography on teaching English in Europe in higher education. In addition to providing sound pedagogical guidelines, it also brings together the most recent critiques of current practice and an overview of the innovative approaches devised in the last ten years. This is a book for all those who are involved in the changing European university scenario: English teachers and writing instructors, lecturers faced with the challenge of teaching their courses in English, university administrators and decision-makers. -- P. [4] of cover.
Book
Legitimation in corporate discourse: Oil corporations after Deepwater Horizon
Despite growing interest in corporate discourse practices, linguists have rarely focused specifically on the discursive legitimation of institutional or corporate actors after perceived episodes of wrongdoing. This may be due to the fact that under normal conditions, legitimation may scarcely be perceptible, only reaching a significant pitch when a major crisis threatens the existence of the agents involved. Should such an event occur, then institutions will summon up a range of justificatory discursive strategies embodying ideological elements that will resonate with socially accepted ideas, feelings or desires. One case in which legitimation could clearly be perceived was that of the oil industry after the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. In the wake of the disaster, as the oil spread and the crisis appeared to be uncontrollable, public opinion turned against the oil industry. It comes as no surprise that the messages to shareholders published in the annual reports of oil corporations during the following year all make reference to the incident and attempt to legitimate both the individual companies and the sector as a whole, in the eyes of the public in general and the shareholders for whom the reports are intended. This article examines the discourses of legitimation used in these texts, focusing specifically on the roles assumed by the writer as scientist and environmentalist as well as financial expert, and on the story-telling techniques used to present the events as a survivor narrative. It discusses ways in which these writers endeavour to engage readers' solidarity, while also appealing to their interests as stakeholders. These discourses operate on an ideological level to underpin the workings of large corporations within the complex panorama of contemporary capitalism.
Journal Article
Integration of theory and practice in CLIL
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has now become a feature of education in Europe from primary school to university level. CLIL programmes are intended to integrate language and content learning in a process of mutual enrichment. Yet there is little consensus as to how this is to be achieved, or how the outcomes of such programmes should be measured. It is evident that a further type of integration is required: that of bringing the practice of CLIL into closer contact with the theory. In this, it is necessary to establish the role played by other fundamental aspects of the learning process, including learner and teacher perspectives, learning strategies, task design and general pedagogical approaches. The first part of this book provides a variety of theoretical approaches to the question of what integration means in CLIL, addressing key skills and competences that are taught and learned in CLIL classrooms, and exploring the role of content and language teachers in achieving an integrated syllabus. The second part takes specific cases and experimental studies conducted at different educational levels and analyses them in the light of theoretical considerations.
Book
Claiming Credibility in Online Comments: Popular Debate Surrounding the COVID-19 Vaccine
At times of crisis, access to information takes on special importance, and in the Internet age of constant connectedness, this is truer than ever. Over the course of the pandemic, the huge public demand for constantly updated health information has been met with a massive response from official and scientific sources, as well as from the mainstream media. However, it has also generated a vast stream of user-generated digital postings. Such phenomena are often regarded as unhelpful or even dangerous since they unwittingly spread misinformation or make it easier for potentially harmful disinformation to circulate. However, little is known about the dynamics of such forums or how scientific issues are represented there. To address this knowledge gap, this chapter uses a corpus-assisted discourse approach to examine how “expert” knowledge and other sources of authority are represented and contested in a corpus of 10,880 reader comments responding to Mail Online articles on the development of the COVID-19 vaccine in February–July 2020. The results show how “expert” knowledge is increasingly problematized and politicized, while other strategies are used to claim authority. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of sociological theories, and some tentative solutions are proposed.
Journal Article
Dimensions of Intercultural Education in the Twenty-first Century
The multicultural society is already a fact, and intercultural education is both a pragmatic necessity and a moral duty. The challenge is to find ways of promoting intercultural education in practice. Much earlier discussion of this issue should be seen against the background of liberal humanist concepts, a logical extension of the rights of man proclaimed at the Enlightenment, moving from individual liberté and égalité to the freedom of expression of different groups and cultures, and ultimately to a notion of the equality of all cultures. However, the liberal solutions which this approach engendered seem now to have worn somewhat thin as they do not take into account the human person, his or her individual psychology, or the all-pervasive nature of the cultures into which he or she has been born. It is significant that the postmodern solutions to the problems of multiculturalism retreat back into the person, dealing with questions of an affective nature, the relationship to otherness, self-esteem and the education of virtues. Only if these issues are satisfactorily resolved can the project of intercultural education be carried forward. From the base of self-esteem and solid values, people will be capable of going out into society to live out not just an absence of prejudice, but a positive solidarity with others. In this perspective, schools with religious commitments have a positive contribution to make to intercultural education, providing they approach the question with realism and trust.
Journal Article
Emotion in politics
Recent political trends in many countries have sparked renewed interest in populism. Despite general agreement that the affective/emotive aspects of political communication are particularly important in this, there is little recent analysis of how populists operationalise emotion or how they genuinely differ from mainstream parties in this sense. This article applies mixed methods to explore the ‘affective-discursive practices’ that characterise the discourses of two opposition parties in the United Kingdom: United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and Labour. Comparison of the frequency of semantic subcategories related to emotion in corpora of press releases published by these parties on their websites is complemented by qualitative analysis of how specific emotional areas such as fear, anger and anxiety are invoked by the two parties. Different ‘affective-discursive practices’ underpin their discourses, since Labour characteristically frames reactions to social phenomena in terms of worry and concern, while UKIP legitimates fear and anger, but also projects more positive emotions.
Journal Article
Displays of anger in Turkish political discourse: a hard choice between cultural norms and political performance of anger
This paper examines the influence of cultural display rules on how high-status individuals, such as political leaders, publicly express anger. Specifically, it focuses on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been the Turkish leader since 2003. The study aims to understand the extent to which Erdoğan’s expression of anger is influenced by cultural display rules, the religious context stemming from his conservative electoral support, and his position as a long-term populist political leader. Using extended conceptual metaphor theory (ECMT) supported by corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the paper seeks to identify the contextual factors that shape anger expressions (both direct and metaphorical) in the political discourse of a populist leader in a collectivist culture. By comparing the conceptualization of ascribed anger and inscribed anger expressions, the analysis reveals that Erdoğan’s discourse presents two distinct scenarios for expressing anger toward ‘us’ and ‘others’. Additionally, it demonstrates how anger is strategically employed in culture-specific ways to navigate the challenges posed by conflicting contextual factors.
Journal Article